1. Field
The present disclosure relates to laser-based ophthalmic intervention technologies, and, more specifically, to creating lesions on an eye using a modular system featuring one or more coherent fiber bundles configured to deliver laser energy to the eye from a laser source located in a separate housing.
2. Related Art
Every year, thousands of patients in the United States and other countries undergo laser-based interventional treatments of the eye. Such treatments typically involve the distribution of laser energy to targeted portions of tissue structures to address clinical problems, such as diabetic retinopathy, diabetic macular edema, age-related macular degeneration, or glaucoma. Several types of systems are available for these procedures.
For example, in one type of system, a single treatment beam may be directed through a delivery device, such as a handheld laser endoprobe, head-mounted laser indirect opthalmoscope (“LIO”), or slit lamp, to be aimed or directed by a surgeon or operator to create burn lesions at desired locations. However, these systems lack patterning capability, and instead rely on the surgeon or operator to generate the desired lesion patterns using the single treatment beam via manipulation of the delivery device.
Another type of system features a patterning capability, wherein scanning hardware, which is typically galvanometric, is utilized to create a pattern of lesions on the targeted eye region. For example, FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary conventional pattern scanning system (100) having a slit lamp apparatus (6) coupled to a scanning/patterning system (10). The scanning/patterning system (10) may be configured to emit a treatment beam (26), which may include either a single treatment beam, such as that shown FIG. 2A, or a patterned treatment beam, such as those shown in FIGS. 2B-E, into the eye (4) of a patient (2) through slit lamp apparatus (6). The treatment beam (26) may be directed by an operator who will typically be positioned adjacent the operator's eyepiece (8). While these types of systems provide patterning capability, they typically require bulky hardware, such as scanning/patterning system (10), located closely adjacent to the patient. This makes the systems difficult to use in situations where the patient is unable to position his or her head upright at the slit lamp table. For example, it would be difficult to use the slit lamp apparatus in an operating room environment where the patient is lying flat on the operating table.
In an attempt to alleviate this problem, some laser-treatment systems, such as that shown in FIG. 1, include a hand-held endoprobe (18) or LIO (16) coupled to the scanning/patterning system (10) by a conventional multi-mode fiber (12, 14—typically directed to either such fiber by a beam splitter). These devices, however, are generally capable of delivering only a single treatment beam. This is because multi-mode fibers typically comprise a single piece of glass fiber with cladding material. As a result, multi-mode fibers (12, 14) are unable to maintain the spatial relationship between areas of laser energy concentration (21) of a patterned treatment beam. In other words, multi-mode fibers (12, 14) are unable to reproduce the patterns shown in FIGS. 2B-E at a distal end of the fiber when applied to a proximal end of the fiber. Instead, the areas of laser energy concentration (21) may mesh together to form a single composite beam when transmitted through multi-mode fibers (12, 14). As a result, endoprobe (18) and LIO (16) lack the patterning capability offered by the slit lamp apparatus (6).
It should be appreciated that FIG. 1 illustrates a simplified system view of an exemplary conventional pattern scanning system. As such, conventional systems may include slight variations to what is shown in FIG. 1, for instance, other systems may instead include a laser source located separately from the scanning/patterning system (10) or may include a laser source located within the slit lamp table. However, to deliver a patterned treatment beam, those systems require scanning/patterning hardware located near the delivery device.
Thus, a system capable of directing patterns through a slit lamp, LIO, endoprobe, and the like, while functioning without the present level of hardware positioned near the patient in the slit lamp configuration, is desired.